


partial to pine

by shizuumi151



Series: this tea is a revelation [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Gender-Neutral My Unit, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Other, Post-timeskip bits at the end, Relationship Study, claude overthinks lol, mostly pre-timeskip, spoilers for Golden Deer route, spoilers for claude's backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 14:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20583746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shizuumi151/pseuds/shizuumi151
Summary: Byleth keeps having tea with Claude. But they also keep having one kind of tea with him, too.It's a lot of little things, but the pieces form a picture when put together, Claude thinks. Or overthinks.





	partial to pine

From the moment Professor Byleth receives a tea set from Ferdinand, the whole monastery is swept into the teatime craze.

As with all things they invest their energy in, Byleth becomes unstoppable, roping unsuspecting students into sharing tea and pleasant conversation over biscuits and cake. The amount of gold Byleth pours into their burgeoning tea fund is as amusing as it is alarming. At times, the only thing that seems to curb their tea power-trip is the fact there are finite hours in the day.

Byleth's tea parties become the talk of the academy, with students wondering who will be invited next. Much of the time, they invite students from other houses. When he catches wind that Dorothea and Petra are thinking to transfer into the Golden Deer, Claude can't say he's anything but proud of his dedicated, poker-faced Teach.

What Claude notices, though, is that they invite him to tea the most.

It becomes a weekly routine. Honestly, there are points where Claude catches himself going to Byleth if they haven't already stormed him to share pastries over tea. Claude knows he didn't enrol in the academy, much less come to Fòdlan, to snack with his professor every week.

But a small part of him, that forward-looking, ever hopeful side of him, welcomes the change of pace. It's good rest for his eyes from nights spent in the library when he entertains Byleth over a warm cup of tea. For all of Byleth's inexperience, they have good taste in snacks, and they make for a remarkable listener. It's comforting, and relaxing, almost, for Claude to do nothing but indulge in a cup with Teach until he wonders where the time has gone.

It's a good chance to observe Byleth even closer, if nothing else.

But Claude can never truly take a break. Even when he tries, his mind races faster than his body can keep up. The nooks and crannies in people's words and actions cry out to him, begging to be explored, and he could never live with himself if he didn't sate his curiosity when it reared its head.

But for all the endless things that could catch Claude's attention, he doesn't expect it to come from his tea parties with Byleth.

* * *

It starts with Claude's face.

Rather, it starts with his professor staring at it non-stop.

Claude isn't a stranger to staring. He's known it since childhood. But the way Byleth unnerves him with their attention is novel. It isn't daggers digging into his skin, but a physical touch. A poke and a press on his jaw, a pressure on his eyes. A stroke along his nose and his cheeks, without Byleth lifting a finger.

He credits himself for being charming, but it's enough to make him blush like a schoolboy.

"Is my face really that interesting?"

He’s a stove; a kettle put on a boil. He can feel his bashfulness seep out of his cheeks, even as he tries valiantly to keep a lid on it asking Byleth outright.

But his professor only blinks at the question. A look aside and a quiet apology, before they devote themselves to taking another sip of the honey-fruit blend they’re trying this week.

Claude chews the inside of his cheek. Of course asking itself would make them stop, but what he really wants is an answer. Even if he’s unendingly curious, there’s only so far he can go before he comes off as rude, accusatory, self-conscious — a neat slew of things that go last in the queue of what Claude wants to be known for.

But maybe he’s paranoid, he decides. He knows his professor, lovely as they are, would choose clashing swords over wit any day of the moon. In their composure laid a charming sort of awkwardness. If Byleth is so taken to staring, maybe it's because they are taken to him. Just another move in a classic game of push-and-pull, and Claude would never be one to stall a good game with his hang-ups and what-ifs, if that were true.

So Claude lets it go. Water off a duck's back, as they keep having their weekly tea, as he falls back into teasing and prodding his dear Teach.

* * *

But then it's the tea.

From the pastries, to the tea set, and Claude swears even the table cloth, Byleth spares no detail in preparing each tea party they host. From a passing by of other tea parties Byleth has in tea week, he sees that some of their companions still have a plate of biscuits where Claude gets to see a stack of cakes fit for high tea. It's a bit of favouritism that he preens in for himself.

Claude could only call it a guess, but a life moving from one battlefield to another would explain how someone as fearsome and brilliant as the Ashen Demon could be enamored with something like tea parties.

Byleth's passion for the craft spans to the tea. An essential staple to a tea party, almost the point of one itself. They like to experiment with which blend they bring, in the spirit of their child-like wonder discovering it all.

By and large, Claude prefers his beverages to have a kick. The tastes of Fòdlan cuisine span far and wide, but not far enough to sprinkle some more spices in its dishes where it wouldn't hurt, it seems. Of all the things Claude misses, the taste of home always stays close to his heart.

So when he smells Almyran pine needle tea before the rim even touches his lips, he can't help the smile that crosses his face.

"This smells amazing," he says, closing his eyes to the smell bringing him home. "I think I love this one."

There are a few teas that Claude is partial to. Chamomile's always soothing, and Leicester Cortania is more of an acquired taste. But the slight tang and woody aroma of Almyran pine needle is one that stirs in him memories of hot summers, rowdy parents, and callousing fingers from taut bowstrings. The warmth of childhood and the comfort of familiarity.

So he doesn't know whether to feel grateful or concerned, when Byleth starts providing it at every tea party they have.

"Almyran...pine needle again, huh?" The glance he gives Byleth is a short, darting one. "You know, it's okay to switch things up, Teach. No need to stick to monotony on my account."

"You like it, don't you?"

Claude's lips press together. For all his scheming and selfish ways, he doesn't like to outright lie to his professor's face.

"I do."

"And you don't seem to be tired of it."

"...I'm not."

Even if it's begrudging, it's a truth he admits. One that Byleth can tell, with the smile that grows soft on their face, and Claude feels like a sniper's got him through the chest.

"I'm not either."

With a hum and a sip of their tea, the matter's settled.

Settled for Byleth, at least.

Staring at the ceiling of his dorm, Claude's mind wears him out poring over the past weeks later that evening. Like every inconsequential little action of Byleth's is one of the historical mythologies littering the bed he's lying on.

"...No," Claude mumbles to himself. "There's no way Teach knows..."

It seems to add up. It's a likely conclusion. Over the past while, in Teach's company, Claude comes to think that the god of fate has a method to the madness.

But he stops to consider the null hypothesis, or even uncanny coincidence. He's hard-pressed to think of Byleth as the sly type, not when they're secretive out of an amnesiac level of ignorance. They're incredibly trusting, at least towards Claude, and it's a reason why he likes them maybe a bit too much. If they had truly found out, he can't imagine what Byleth would achieve hinting at it constantly, never addressing it outright once.

"So they like staring and Almyran tea. Big deal." Claude turns over on his bed, finger trailing down the spine of the tome on the Ten Saints currently occupying him. "Nothing to worry about. Teach doesn't know."

* * *

Teach might know.

They start to give him gifts at the end of their parties. The board game seemed innocuous enough, but upon closer inspection he sees it's fashioned out of ivory found only in Almyra. When he tries to ignore it, he gets another board game the next week, only this time —

“It’s a game that originated from Almyra,” they explain. “I know you like board games, but I figured I couldn’t get you the exact same thing as last time.”

By the next tea party they have, Claude feels a sweat coming on. He’d only known Byleth for a few moons, at best. Even if he had made headway with his investigation into the church, into Byleth's past, he had only scratched the surface. He wasn't nearly ready to bare his past and himself to Teach like that. Not yet.

"Calm down, Claude. You're getting ahead of yourself," he says, under his breath, as he wears a hole into his floor pacing along it so often. "It's like with Annette's song. You're reading too much into it. It's a lotta coincidences, but there's no way it's _that._"

He stops, his new board games catching his eye, just sitting on his desk. He forces himself to keep looking with a swallow, allowing himself only two more paces in his room.

"They're trusting to a fault. Obliviousness incarnate!" He throws his hands up, runs them through his hair. His sigh deflating his whole body as he convinces himself, bouncing when he throws himself back on his book-strewn bed. "There's no way that Teach knows."

* * *

"I never realised, but dolls are traditionally meant for women. I've never seen a doll made for a man in Fòdlan." Byleth angles the soft toy in their hands, a sparkle in their eye. "So I was surprised to see this on the market."

With the smell of Almyran pine needles aloft, Byleth shows Claude a button-eyed doll of Nader the Undefeated with a gentle, delighted grin.

"What do you think? Do you like it?"

* * *

Teach knows.

It's been moons since Claude first suspected, and Teach absolutely knows.

"Okay, Claude, _think_. Teach knows where you come from. What does this mean? What do I do?"

His bed has a space shaped like him from all the tome angels he's done, staring at the steam coming off his brain from thinking so much. Buzzing to his fingertips, he can't stay still, and he's already making his own wind walking circles in his room. There are definitely tracks on his floor at this point.

"Agh, this isn't good." He clutches at his head, scratching above his ears in thought and frustration and too much of both. "I need a breather."

He strides out for the stables. His wyvern — a sweet, yellow-eyed beauty he calls Delilah — is confused to see him in the amber of evening, when sky watch duty is long over. But one serving of poultry and behind-the-horn pets, and she's kicking up dust raring for take-off.

He flys around Garreg Mach, the city instead of the monastery. The beat of Delilah's wings flaps hard and steady, her large body rolling under his saddle to the rhythm as they take to the skies. With the wind billowing his hair, snaking through his clothes to swathe goosebumps over his skin, he spies the edge of the Fòdlan's Throat swallowing the sun whole. Cracking it open so it bleeds red over the heavens, and his heart yearns to cleave that mountain range in two by his own hand all the more.

But he finds his favourite spot on a lone hilltop. He parks Delilah gently, letting her settle into a well-deserved nap before he settles back onto the grass. Dewy at his fingers when he sits, he lies back till he's facing a cloudless sky dying the world a robin-egg blue.

Claude loves stargazing. Where Faerghus dwellers have their hearths to cuddle up to, he figures watching the stars is the equivalent for him. It centres his mind, soothes his heart, and humbles him into peace. His head is filled with nothing but misgivings and problems and workarounds for them. The stars look down on him and his trifles and let him know his place: just a speck in an unspeakably vast domain, and Claude cherishes that feeling of smallness, of near insignificance, more than words could say.

So his roaring ambition settles to a glowing ember, whenever he looks upon the stars. It says something that he's never made a wish upon one. He knows that they will watch over him with unwavering trust; an unshakeable faith that Seiros herself might long for. But Claude takes stock in his own power. In the power of people, forging bonds with each other, so that they may overcome anything.

In all of that, he wonders where Byleth fits.

Byleth is unbelievable, he concludes. They're a stellar professor, and a masterful tactician, wielding the unfathomable power of the Sword of the Creator with the Crest of Flames. The goddess resided within them, of all things. Claude doesn't know whether he's been playing chaperone to a legendary hero at this point, but that may well come to pass when historians start putting quill to paper on their exploits moons or years from now.

But Byleth is also clueless. If someone accused them of living under a rock most of their life, Claude would think twice before defending them. Without having any known case of amnesia, they used to know little more than their name and the clothes on their back. They only had their father, who seemed to give Rhea a run for her money for the numbers of secrets he kept from his own child, as they transitioned from one battleground to the next, never knowing the luxury or leisure of something as commonplace as teatime.

Claude remembers when Byleth first arrived. To all his glosses on life in the monastery, and even how lectures worked, how they simply nodded and applied them immediately. To the novelty of working with battalions and the role of commander, how they stayed in the library reading up on group tactics and military stratagems till the tower bell sounded. To the prospect of taking responsibility of a house of ragtag misfits, how they took pause in the monastery courtyards to flip through their journal before heading off to check on a student, either showering them with gifts or just talking to them.

Byleth is unbelievable, and Claude might just trust them with his life.

His eyes widen with a start. The sky grows inky with the looming night, and he lets more starlight in with his wonder.

"...Huh." His head rolls back on the grass, wading in thought again. "So that's how it is..."

He can hear Delilah snort behind him, rousing from her nap. The winds of Fòdlan whisper into his ear, calling him again. A shooting star streaks across his vision, and a grin that fits Claude to the ends wreathes itself on his lips. Silly, confident, and — at the heart of it — endlessly hopeful in the dark of night.

* * *

It's okay if Byleth knows.

He's comfortable with telling them he isn't from Fòdlan. He doesn't mention Almyra by name, but there isn't any need to given what they know. Claude figures that they won't bring it up themselves, and they'll never do anything with the information.

He's proven right. When they reunite five years later, and again after another two, there isn't a single time Byleth uses his birth and blood against him. Even if he's rarely wrong, it's gratifying to know.

Now, after quashing the remnant rebellion forces from the old war, he indulges in the peacetime of a world of his and Byleth's own making. People from all over the world — Almyra, Brigid, Sreng, and Duscur — visit Fòdlan alike, chatter and squabble and laugh as any gathering of people is wont to do, as he enjoys his afternoon tea with his beloved in their sunroom in Derdriu.

"You know, my love, you were the first person to ever get the jump on me," he says, reaching for a biscuit. "Well, besides the whole Edelgard-preparing-for-war-under-our-noses thing. We'll call that an exception to the rule."

Byleth frowns at him, cup sinking from their lips. "How do you mean?"

"Oh, you know," he says after a mouthful of shortbread, gesturing broadly. "How you were the first to find out I was from Almyra and all. You got me in a real tizzy at the time, I'll tell you that."

"Ah, that. I remember." As Byleth sets down their cup, Claude gives a small hum, washing down the shortbread with a sip of tea. "I was quite surprised when you first told me, but in hindsight I should've guessed."

Byleth picks up a biscuit, enjoying the texture and the crunch melting to a sweet, chewier mixture as they eat, and the hum of pleasure settles into their marrow when they swallow.

"I have to go visit that baker again sometime soon; these biscuits are wonderful. Claude, have you tried the — "

Byleth rears back. Looking up and down at their husband, tea dripping down his chin from his open mouth, cup spilling onto the table.

"..._What?_"

* * *

A towel, a tablecloth, and a fresh set of trousers later, Claude is crossing his arms. Looking down in thought and resolutely away from Byleth who cackles themselves into a fit next to him on their bed.

"You — I knew you were an overthinker, I did, but — " Byleth claps their own forehand, their hand staying their as they clutch their gut, rolling back on the duvet. "I must've driven you to your wit's end...!"

"Yeah, well," Claude mutters, scuffing the spotless carpet with his heel. "Wasn't so hard to believe, what with all the stunts you pulled."

Their smile is boundless. "It was the Nader doll, wasn't it?"

Claude just turns to them, looking so utterly deadpan that it would put Dedue to shame. Byleth falls apart all over again.

"Oh, Claude, love, I'm so sorry," they manage, sitting up to cup his face when they catch their breath. "I honestly didn't know. But even if I did, I wouldn't have used it against you." They put their forehead to his, nuzzling for his attention. "You know that, surely."

Refusing to turn immediately out of principle, Claude glances at Byleth's face.

Their cheeks are bunched tight with their uncontrollable grin, face flushed with laughter and mirth dancing in their eyes. Their mint hair smoulders in the daylight, framing their joy. Recalling the blue, deadened oceans they once held in their gaze, exploding into a sea foam starburst of light and life, Claude can't find the heart to be annoyed, or even pretend to be.

"Yeah, I know," he murmurs. He nuzzles Byleth back, his hand gentle on their wrist when he kisses their cheek. "You still need to make it up to me, though. I'll take anything at this point, but I'll need something."

"A recompense for your trauma, for sure," Byleth hums, full of humour and sympathy. "Why don't we take the wyverns out to play? That always cheers you up."

"But by gods, you might just be a genius," Claude swoons. "Knew I married you for a reason."

He plants a kiss onto their lips with his gushing, grinning at Byleth's chuckling. He's on his feet before Byleth is, pulling them along to see his favourite darlings in the world, second only to his beloved.

"Could we have some more tea later as well?" he asks, taking Byleth's hand in his.

"I guess our teatime was cut short earlier," they grant. "Do you want Almyran pine needle again? I can get another blend if you want."

In a squeeze of his hand, they give him a beaming smile. It lights up a hearth in Claude's heart, infectious as he twinkles back at Byleth with a shake of his head.

"Nah, you know I like it best. Besides, having it with you?" He kisses Byleth's hair, hugging them close. "Makes it better every time."

**Author's Note:**

> maaaaan, i stayed up LATE to finish this when i did not have to. but it was damn fun to write!! but also rip to the typos i won't catch till a day later 8')
> 
> one of the many little ideas i have for my new husband i've managed to churn out. hope you liked reading it!
> 
>   
[tumbly link](https://shizuumi151.tumblr.com/post/187607896770/partial-to-pine-shizuumi151-fire-emblem)  
[twitty link](https://twitter.com/shizuumi151/status/1171185701133504515?s=20)


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